RECONNAISSANCE

Satellites

Articles

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The Discoverer 2 spy satellite is a joint project of DARPA and the NRO. Its goal "is to see if a radar satellite can spot and track troop and vehicle movements on the ground in all kinds of weather.... It is estimated that 18 to 24 satellites in orbit could provide continuous unobscured observation of anything that moves or goes under cover.... The House Appropriations Committee zeroed funding for [the project],... citing technical risk, concern it may cost more than expected and lack of a formal ... requirement.... Defense Secretary William Cohen reportedly is sending a letter to Congress asking the appropriations conference to approve the requested $108 million" for fiscal year 2000.

Hall, R.C. "Post War Strategic Reconnaissance and the Genesis of Project Corona." In Corona -- Between the Earth and the Sun: The First NRO Reconnaissance
Eye in Space, ed. Robert A. McDonald, 25-58. Bethesda, MD: American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 1997.

According to government, military, and industry officials, the DNI and the defense secretary "are asking the Obama administration to approve" the building of "two sophisticated satellites equal to or better than the huge, high-resolution secret satellites now in orbit.... [T]he government would also commit to spend enough money on commercial satellite imagery sufficient to pay for the construction and launch of two new commercial satellites." The uniformed military had argued for developing a "new class of more numerous, less expensive, lower-orbiting satellites."

According to government and industry officials, the Pentagon "will buy and operate one or two commercial imagery satellites and plans to design and build another with more sophisticated spying capabilities .... The Broad Area Surveillance Intelligence Capability (BASIC) satellite system will cost between $2 billion and $4 billion." The NRO will "buy and operate the satellites." Military commanders "will, for the first time, have the power to dictate what satellites will photograph when they pass overhead. The concept is known as 'assured tasking.'... Now, they submit their requests to a national intelligence authority that prioritizes the missions."

Jehl, Douglas.

1. "Debate on Secret Program Bursts Into Open." New York Times, 10 Dec. 2004. [http://www.nytimes.com]

"An intense secret debate about a previously unknown, enormously expensive technical intelligence program has burst into light in the form of scathing criticism from members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. For two years,... Republicans and Democrats on the panel have voted to block the secret program, which is believed to be a system of new spy satellites. But it continues to be financed ... with support from the House, the Bush administration and Congressional appropriations committees."

According to current and former government officials, "[a] highly classified intelligence program that the Senate Intelligence Committee has tried unsuccessfully to kill is a new $9.5 billion spy satellite system that could take photographs only in daylight hours and in clear weather.... The cost of the system, now the single biggest item in the intelligence budget, and doubts about its usefulness have spurred a secret Congressional battle."

A review by DNI John D. Negroponte "is stirring a major upheaval within the country's spy satellite programs." In an announcement last week, the NRO said "that a Boeing Company contract to provide the next generation of reconnaissance satellites, known as the Future Imagery Architecture, was being 'restructured.'" However, according to officials and experts, Negroponte has "ordered that Boeing stop work on a significant part of the project ... under a plan to shift the mission to Lockheed Martin." The part of the program that involves radar-surveillance satellites "would remain with Boeing.... [I]t is not clear whether the proposal goes far enough to answer Congressional demands for deep cuts in spending on reconnaissance satellite programs."

This article looks at what the 80 recently released National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) and the discussion at the joint CIA-Harvard conference reveal about the state of U.S. knowledge of Soviet ICBM research and deployment in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The author sees a three-tiered system shaping
up with regard to the use of space: The first tier (with manned space operations)
is the United States and Russia; a second tier includes China, France,
Great Britain, India, Israel, and Japan (with satellite launch capabilities);
a third tier consists of those countries which will rely on other countries'
space assets. A rising trend is the use of commercial satellite images
for military applications. Generally, "the diffusion of satellite
technology generates problems as well as opportunities for international
security."

"Today's [imagery] systems are fragmented
and do not form a coherent, responsive, flexible, efficient and effective
system to serve the needs of all imagery users." The goal is "a
consumer-driven corporate structure with integrated global communications
and delivery systems."

A "$1.7 billion project approved last week" seeks "to have two new satellites in orbit by 2012." The government's last spy satellite effort, the so-called Future Imagery Architecture, was canceled in 2005 before a single satellite was launched, at a cost of "at least $4 billion." There is already debate over whether the new program, the Broad Area Space-Based Imagery Collector, "should be building two new satellites of its own or acquiring images from private companies."

"As Operation Desert Fox unfolded in December and the Pentagon released reconnaissance photographs taken from space of destroyed Iraqi targets, retired CIA scientist Allen Thomson sat at his home computer in El Paso and produced a schedule of classified U.S. satellite overpasses of Baghdad from the hour the bombing began. Thomson was not trying to alert Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but to underscore a point he has been making for years about supersecret U.S. spy satellites: They aren't so secret anymore."

"A secret program for developing the next generation of spy satellites [called Future Imagery Architecture (FIA)] is underfunded and behind schedule and could leave the CIA and Pentagon with gaps in satellite coverage critical to the war on terrorism if the program cannot be restructured, defense and intelligence officials said."